A Power to Persuade | The Weekly Standard

A Power to Persuade | The Weekly Standard
This front page article is a double book review about Glamour by Virginia Postrel, one of the most remarkable people alive today.
She's the past editor of REASON Magazine, when it was truly a smart read and at its zenith. She has written two insightful books that explain remarkable subtleties in how our world is shaped and now posts and writes two blogs, Dynamist (http://www.dynamist.com/weblog/index.html) and Deep Glamour (http://www.deepglamour.net/). Deep Glamour is a mixture of style, taste and some of the little unseen bizarre and a bit of the disturbing.
But most of all she is humanity herself. Her colleague Dr. Sally Satel was dying of kidney failure. When Dr. Satel's potential donors backed out and her situation became profoundly serious, Virginia Postrel offered her Kidney with an attitude as if she were making a simple passage expected in everyday life. She made a remarkable passage indeed! Unrelated to her kidney gift, Virginia Postrel later suffered breast cancer.
These two things both scare the hell out of me...and I groom, ride and/or jump my 1,250 lb. horse, who can kill me faster than I can say rear and kick. Bravery has its own armour.
A couple of years ago I happened to see her briefly at the LA Times Book-faire of C-SPAN's Book-TV. I noticed how tired she appeared and how she had seemed to age suddenly. I had not been aware at that time of her kidney donation and breast cancer. A few weeks ago she appeared with Sally Satel on John Stossel's FoxBiz TV show. She was back to her lovely, vital self, albeit with a little gray.
Here is a video interview Virginia Postrel made at REASON.TV about cancer drugs and health care reform.